Change From Outer to Inner Laws in the New Age

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 227 | January 15, 1975

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Greetings, my very beloved friends. Blessings for every one of you. Divine love reaches out to you, seeps deep into your heart and embraces you. Let it give you the peace of the ultimate reality that you can and will find within your innermost being if you go all the way with yourself.

In this lecture I wish to give you another vision of the growth process in which you as individuals, and the planet as a whole, are involved. Every seed contains the plan of its ultimate self-evolution and fulfillment. This plan always follows its own organic way. You have experienced some of this phenomenon in your pathwork. You have seen, again and again, that an organic process unfolds completely independent of your mind and conscious expectations. Such a plan fulfills itself in certain stages. Whenever new stages are reached, new energies are released.

Now let us look at this phenomenon on the most superficial, material level of manifestation. Let us take the outer growth of a human being. You can see very distinct phases in human growth. When the infant is ready to unfold dormant capacities to learn how to speak and walk, new energies must become available, otherwise the unfoldment cannot take place. This is the first major change after incarnation on the physical level. The next major phase of expansion occurs when the child is ready to leave home and go to school. This is not only a physical expansion, but also an inner expansion, a step out into the world. The child unfolds its inherent potential to cope with others outside the home. Such growth continues throughout its entire life span.

When full physical growth is reached, these phases are less noticeable than during childhood; however, they are just as distinct and real. These phases always mean change, growth, and higher levels of creative self-expression in dealing with the world without and within. Your physicians know that every few years changes occur in the cellular system. Actually, the chemical components totally change in the outer structure. Again, although this process is not noticeable, it is nevertheless very real.

The same stages of growth and change apply even more dynamically on the mental, emotional, spiritual and psychic levels of the inner being. Each stage is an orderly step toward the fulfillment of the seed plan. The seed plan automatically releases new energies. When the entity follows its plan, these energies become extremely beneficial. They aid the process of growth, of change, of expansion, of reaching into new dimensions from within, of moving outward and embracing more of reality—that inner reality whose aim it is to transform outer reality according to its own perfection, limitless beauty, and endless possibilities of expression.

When, however, the movement is hindered as the outer ego-consciousness resists the process, makes itself insensitive to it and ignores it urgings, then the energies are not allowed to unfold in their intrinsically harmonious way. The constructive power of these energies then turns destructive, though only in the limited light of human vision. Actually the destruction is always aimed at eliminating the obstructions, the untruth, the infringements on divine unfoldment. The blockages the consciousness sets in the way of the released energies need to be dissolved, and this manifests in the life of the person as upheaval, crisis, painful destruction. The individual needs to learn how to see and understand these happenings. They are not haphazard events.

Whenever the consciousness is open, in truth, in accord with divine law, the energies move organically and harmoniously. Wherever the consciousness is contrary to truth, the energies are inverted and turn, apparently, against the self.

This process embraces all being, all creation. What applies to the individual entity applies just as much to the planet. The planet Earth is an entity, and the same laws of growth, the same stages of unfoldment apply to it as to the individual. With both the individual and the planetary entity, each period of expansion is quite distinct. The energies that need to be released to make possible the expansion inherent in the seed plan must be strong. Hence the positive manifestations are extremely noticeable. Changes, unfoldments of new potentials, renewed creativity, new approaches to the self and others that reveal a much greater maturity, increased well-being and bliss, increased vision of new alternatives for self-expression, manifest when these energies are used according to plan. Crisis and destruction manifest when the new energies are not recognized as an influx of divine forces and are therefore resisted as if they were a hostile force. All regressive and reactionary attitudes, as well as radical revolutionary ones are nothing but blockages. The latter is a blockage no less than the former, being merely an outward projection of what emotions are held back with a misdirected emphasis.

How does this apply to the present new influx of the unfolding Christ consciousness in this New Age, which is one of the stages of expansion? If an individual is ready to reach adulthood but blocks it, the adult energies released into the psychic, emotional, and physical system will create a crisis. This phenomenon is widely ignored among your scientists and educators, and even among your psychologists. The same is true of the planet. Your planet is ready for adulthood and strives to unfold it. Yet the planet also harbors resistant elements that fear, resist and want to ignore the process. So you can recognize factions of people who are totally oblivious to inner processes. You can also see groups who sense some of these processes. And then there are those who are very keenly aware of the inner reality and see the outer reality for exactly what it is: merely a reflection, a manifestation.

The less evolved organization of consciousness, which is focused only on the outer manifestation, is in a state of separateness. It is unable to perceive the oneness of all being and therefore proceeds in ways that split off the self from others. Selfishness, greed, ruthlessness, unconcern, and cruelty are manifestations of this turn of mind. Since the precepts behind these attitudes are based on illusion, they must ultimately prove painful and unworkable and are being destroyed by every new influx of divine energy. This truth is not always understood in its true significance. It often requires a great deal of time and development before the inner meaning of such a crisis can become clear.

The blindness that is unable to perceive the oneness of all being is distinctive—it is based on the apparent diversity of interests between self and others. Such a personality can see no further than the immediate point and neglects, or even refuses, to see beyond this point. It remains unaware of the connecting links between the self and others.

In the age just past, which we can call the early adolescent stage of planetary consciousness, humanity had to learn to make a very crude kind of distinction between good and evil, between social and antisocial behavior, between constructive and destructive acts. This was a totally dualistic state, inevitable because the consciousness of the planet was not able to perceive anything beyond dualism. It was also a necessary preparation for the next age, the one you have now entered. You have to acquire the strength of character to withstand temptation before you can realize that nothing is being sacrificed by growing up, because your real interest cannot ever differ from that of others.

In previous ages this distinction could not be made. Humanity was then incapable of distinguishing good from evil, between what was constructive and what was destructive for others, even if it seemed advantageous to the self. In those earlier periods, people were governed merely by impulse and desire. What was immediately gratifying seemed “good,” and no consideration could be given to anything beyond it. Consciousness was then in its infancy. Only in the age that has now come to an end could the struggle be taken up to choose between interests that seemed divergent. The pain created by the blindness of the undeveloped state becomes its own medicine and lesson. I have often mentioned this divine law, which is so hard for humanity to recognize. If you give up what seems to be your interest because you recognize that not doing so would harm others, you prepare for the next stage of development, where you can have a fuller vision. This also applies to the planet as a whole.

The dualistic way of seeing reality is still very deeply embedded in the human consciousness, so everything seems to pose a choice between either the self or the other, and the conflicts of conscience that result are often quite severe. Needless to say, all human beings cannot always make that apparent sacrifice in order to preserve decency, kindness, and constructive behavior because such action is still so deeply experienced as being against the self. Therefore when you are sacrificing from a dualistic consciousness, you often do so to your detriment. Such sacrifice is illusory, and not an expression of divine love, kindness, decency, nor honesty. But if these attributes seem to extract severe sacrifice, sacrifice must be experienced, for you shall experience as you believe. You have all experienced in your purification process how resentful and deprived you feel when you refrain from destructive behavior, and also how guilty and self-rejecting you feel when you give in to the temptation of following the call of the immediate desire of the lower self.

The laws and mores of civilization in the age just past hinged on this basic duality, thus on a limited vision of reality. At the same time this limited vision was a much needed testing ground. All the manifestations of strife and upheaval, natural as well as artificial, expressed this conflict between the seemingly divergent interests of the self and others. Now this age has come to an end. Those who have sacrificed for the good of all, for the sake of a divine principle, will find that this is no longer necessary, that a deeper level of truth can be reached, for you now see that what harms the self, harms others, and what harms others also harms the self. Those who have acted primarily on the selfish and destructive level must come to a change of heart if the powerful energies that are being released on the inner plane of the planet are to be creative and constructive for them. Otherwise they will create unbearable tensions that will culminate in crisis.

The planet Earth has come to a stage of development in which the old structure can no longer be maintained. It cannot bear the tensions and restrictions of the old limited consciousness. A new vision must be gained in which the self and others are perceived as one. You have to look for this new vision beneath the limited vision to which the immediate consciousness is so accustomed. This new vision brings enormous peace, security, joy, and self-expression. It is not an illusory image of wishful thinking; it is stark reality.

You all know, my friends, that the distinction between people who are still steeped in the old consciousness and those who share the new perception is not always simple, for humanity is not cut from one cloth. Many human beings are on the brink of change and need help and guidance to pull them over into the new. Even those who are by and large ready to let the new consciousness express itself through them, whose personality already embraces the new Christ consciousness, find areas within where they still maintain the old, selfish, narrow vision. Those are the areas you call your “problems.” Perhaps we can now see this in a different and more comprehensive light. It is too simple to say that these are “problems.” They express a rhythm of growth and expansion.

Some people are already prepared for this New Age of consciousness, and in this sense this consciousness already exists. They are the pioneers. They create a new civilization. The beginnings have already been made, in various places all over the Earth. There are also a considerable number of human beings who are not quite yet in the new consciousness but are capable of reaching that state. This requires very intense work with guidance. The way to do this is being presented to you through this channel. More of this preparation is needed all over the world. And it will come. Your task is very important, for you are not merely concerned with those human beings who have attained the new consciousness, who are pioneers in creating a new civilization. You are also called upon to undergo your own purification work, your own growth process, so that your inner vision will be enlarged and your present state of manifest consciousness will alter according to your seed plan. Then you can help others, in many different ways, to accomplish the same. There need not be a very strict differentiation between those who are in the old and those who are in the new. There are a number of human beings who at this stage of development are not ready to undergo the necessary discipline of the work. But there are more than you realize who might be able to do it but unfortunately do not do so. There are also many human beings who can and wish to widen and deepen their consciousness according to their plan.

This work is not sufficiently spread on the earth plane and it needs more emphasis. This will happen. Your own nucleus here can and will play an important role in this task, in exchanges with other New Age centers that are willing to accept the process of becoming and do not just let everyone stay wherever they are. Work needs to be done. This work of preparing the inner consciousness of more and more individuals for the inner reality to unfold really means very plainly just one thing: liberating God within you, liberating God within the general consciousness of humanity.

The God consciousness that existed in previous ages was always projected outward, as you well know. Then, as a necessary preparation, the pendulum had to swing to emphasis on the self. The individual had to give up God outside to assume full responsibility for the self. But to make the transition from the God outside to God inside, and bridge that gap in time and space, a transitory period of atheism or agnosticism had to come to prepare the individual for full autonomy and selfhood. This had to happen first only on the outer levels, for full autonomy and selfhood on all levels can exist only when God within is liberated and when your oneness with God has been found. That is reality.

Now, my friends, wherever the planet Earth resists the powerful energies and does not follow its seed plan, its development has to proceed differently from the development of those aspects of the planetary consciousness that are ready to embrace the new. This division is necessary, organic, and inevitable. Individuals who are blind to the meaning of the crisis that was caused by obstructing the movement will feel victimized by it and will insist that everything is hopeless. But those in the know will be aware of the real meaning of the crisis and will not fear it. They know it is a change that may, at the moment, present some difficulties in the process of adjusting to new modalities, but they also know that this means welcome liberation and greater joy.

Exactly the same happens within the individual. Those of you who work on the path find out incontrovertibly, and without a shadow of doubt if you are willing to really look, that each crisis you experience means a negation of truth, a violation of your divinity. And that is why you are in difficulties, crisis, and suffering. You are in fact blocking the immensely powerful energy stream of your spiritual growth process. With this new awareness, you also gain a wonderful key, which helps you to recognize and open up those areas of consciousness where you have blocked and inverted powerful creative energies, so that they have turned against you. On this path you learn to harmonize the whole process by surrendering all of you to the Christ who is awakening within you, on your plane of inner reality. Exactly the same process applies to the planet.

You who have crated your Center and experience so much life and growth, pain and joy and true peace through this process, sometimes fall into the error of believing that the life you lead in the short periods you spend there is too beautiful and meaningful to be real. Reality could not be that way. It is too much, you feel. When you come into your ordinary surroundings, your outer life, you designate that as the “real” life. Nothing could be further from the truth, my friends. What you call the real life is the most illusory life, where almost everything is turned upside down. There, only the outer, most superficial manifestations are recognized and dealt with; thus life is being fragmented into a meaningless pattern. In the new civilization that you are beginning to found, you learn to make the connections between cause and effect, between the various apparently fragmented pieces of experience and consciousness. You learn to discover the deeper and more real life within you that creates the outer circumstances. You thus approach reality and, at times, gain it in a much more comprehensive way. Once you connect with this reality, the superficial, illusory outer appearance will become much easier for you to deal with, provided you do not fall back into seeing it as the only reality that counts. When you do so, you distort the truth.

I will say to you, my friends, that the new reality you are discovering will manifest in your Center. You already begin to see it happening. You will become a part of the new civilization and the new culture that is slowly growing. The forces building this new reality are, at the same time, destroying whatever obstructs this movement. For there cannot be growth and creation without also a destruction of destructiveness. Destruction of whatever is already obsolete and therefore needs to go must take place, but the manifest consciousness clings to it and opposes the purifying movement. These obsolete attitudes may have had their functions in a less developed state of consciousness, but to pursue them now makes no sense. You all know how true this is from your individual work. You find within your soul substance attitudes and reactions that were very understandable and even appropriate when you were infants and small children. But you hold on to them as if they still had reality value. To the degree that you are doing this, you create obstructions, unhappiness, strife, frustration, crisis, and finally destruction, so that the old may crumble and you can begin to build the new.

If you are willing to give up the old, obsolete attitude and adopt a new, more appropriate one, the painful crises and destruction are unnecessary. With willingness the change occurs most organically, harmoniously, and beautifully. Where you hold back deliberately, where you deny and choose to delude yourself that it is all right, that it does not matter, or that you cannot do it, that it is too difficult, you invite inevitable crisis and pain. Exactly the same applies to all of humanity as an entity. Each individual is to all of humanity as an aspect or an attitude is in relation to your total personality. Just as you find yourself in inner strife because part of you wants to grow and part of you wants to hold back, so it is with the planet. Parts of it want to grow, while other parts want to hold back and deny that such a conflict even exists. There are thus those who want change and those who resist it in the overall entity to which all of you belong.

Understanding this lecture, my friends, should help you greatly to commit yourself to change on a deeper level of your being. For change is one of the byproducts of the New Age. I will now try to explain the importance of change in a very specific area.

Let us return for a moment to the concepts of good and evil, meaning by them that which is constructive and in accordance with divine truth and law, and that which is opposed to it. The rigid law that had to exist for the primitive consciousness of the past had to decree dos and don’ts, commands and prohibitions. The totally childish and self-indulgent consciousness does need such rules imposed from the outside. Without them there would have been chaos, and the most destructive impulses would have been acted out to a much greater degree. Such severity, however, also brought a certain rigidity and superficiality to human existence. Obeying rules blindly is a temptation to avoid thinking for oneself and struggling with the often more complex issues of inner morality. Blind obedience to rules enhances laziness of thinking, the easy way of not taking responsibility and avoiding the often necessary search that must precede true answers, enlightenment. This is why I so often stress in my guidance that your customary belief that one action is right and the other wrong is most of the time faulty. I have painstakingly shown you throughout the years that most of the time either alternative could be governed by the most sincere or the most dishonest motives. Only when you sort out the dishonest motives on both sides can you open the channel to your inner God and receive the guidance you require. This means labor, courage, search. Obeying the outer rule prevents this. So what I have shown you about how to approach such questions is truly an expression of the New Age consciousness that will spread much more over the planet as humanity develops.

I have also pointed out to you throughout the years how the dualistic approach creates confusion and distortion of truth in another way. Some people claim that a specific attitude to life is desirable, while its opposite is supposed to be undesirable. Others assert the contrary. Each group uses the distortion, exaggeration, and fanaticism of the other as a proof that their side is correct. For example, some say introspection is the only way of life, while outgoingness and extroversion are harmful and erroneous. Others claim the exact opposite. Still others believe only in active expression and reject all receptive, passive attitudes, and vice versa. Many other life attitudes are likewise divided. Whole philosophies are based on such divisions; painstaking treatises are written in which a lot of half-truths are used to present one side of the matter. Many issues meet this fate of rigid division. I have shown how the dualistic either/or is rigid, shortsighted and no longer applicable. However, this polarization was an inevitable byproduct of the rule system—rules which the primitive consciousness required in order to avoid destroying another human being willfully, blindly, and selfishly, in a state of emotional alienation where the other person’s pain was not experienced as real.

I do not say that humanity has now sufficiently progressed so that outer rules are no longer necessary. Obviously this is not yet true. There are always those who would still harm others willfully and selfishly, cruelly and irresponsibly, in spite of the rules from outside. But this applies only to the darkest, most undeveloped aspects of the lower self of the entity, individual as well as planetary. To an increasing degree the rules begin to make way for a new inner sense of morality and conscience. The Christ consciousness that evolves within brings humanity into a state in which sooner or later, little by little, outer rules will become superfluous. For the inner God knows what is truth, what is love, and what is divine reality, and the personality will act from that innermost center.

This can already be seen to a small degree. As you follow a psychological inner path in your emotional life, no rules are applicable—at least no rules from outside. But on your inner path you find the beauty of divine law working in utter perfection, as well as benign love and justice. The child, the lower self in you, may blindly rebel against the laws, but once you want to awaken, you must be overwhelmed by the grandeur of this divine scheme in which all is well, and there is nothing to fear, if you choose to see this plan and go with it. You know your inner truth; no one else can tell it to you. No one act is right or wrong per se, on that level. Yet it is also true at certain times that your inner plan, your divine self, wishes you, needs you to go into a certain direction and not in another. But this cannot be superimposed from the outside. Only when you go very deeply into yourself and transcend the rules, the adherence to public opinion, give up the facade and the self-interest that comes from the lower self, the need to please, as well as the need to rebel and to spite, will you find the ultimate truth. All outer help can show you only how to go deeply enough to recognize your investment in a false vision of reality. Those outside of you can often see the maze you cannot see and can therefore help you. But the ultimate realization is that of your own inner law, once you find your inner God.

The idea of the New Age points in this direction. The outer law is often parallel to the inner law. Many outer laws are manifestations of divine law, but have lost the dynamic connectedness with their divine origin and are therefore disconnected structures. When it comes to destructive acts of killing, stealing, or in other ways robbing others of their rights, there can be no question that the outer law is parallel to the inner law. But then we also encounter more complex situations, where the inner law is not that simple. This is where our new approach can bring forth the truth and reality of the divine law on an inner level.

At times you may find the outer law to be completely opposite to the inner law of God. A simple example on the crassest outer level of manifestation is the following: If you happen to live in a land whose government is corrupt and requires the individual to commit acts against humanity—that is, against God—to follow the outer law would be going against divine law. It requires a great deal of courage to stand up for the inner truth and defy the outer law. But people can lose themselves in a maze of inner confusion and can take refuge in the outer law, for that may be the easier way. By the same token, people could misuse the words I am saying in order to justify a lower-self trend to defy an outer law. Again, very close inspection of the real motives and attitudes is the only true answer. There are no rules about when to follow and when to break rules, or how to follow them.

The Christ consciousness is not rebellion and revolution; it is not, in itself, destruction of the old. It is reformulation and change, a new organization of eternal values which already existed in the old consciousness but which must be expressed in a new way in the New Age. The Christ consciousness brings a new morality that little by little wipes away the outer commandments, outer regulations and the outer written and unwritten laws. Laws are still necessary for quite a time in your terms, but the trend is in this direction. Where you act out your lower self, you need those laws to protect others. But where you have outgrown the lower self, you do not need to be told not to harm others, you know it, and you have no desire to do so.

In the more complex matters of personal relationships to self and others, the laws are already dissolving, for the new consciousness makes them superfluous. To the degree you allow God to awaken in you, outer laws will disappear. The laws of morality will be completely flexible. Each case is different. But for that you need the labor, courage and honesty of self-knowledge so that you cannot be corrupted by lower-self motives. You also need to take each individual issue separately and deal with it completely anew. That is the action of the adult, mature entity, and humanity is moving toward that goal. But you cannot do this when you resist change, for this flexible attitude requires a constantly changing world. Freedom and change are inseparable. Enslavement and rigidity are equally inseparable. If you want it to be all so simple that you won’t have to search and put energy and attention into whatever the issue may be, if you want it all handed to you, you need to deal with inflexible rules that confine and enslave. Only those who have overcome rebellion against authority because they are their own inner authority, because they have that honesty, can be free. That means embracing change. Each issue requires a new, different, very flexible approach. Situations that may appear similar may in fact be quite different and require an entirely new approach. So freedom is completely dependent on your ability to change.

Now, my friends, I have given you material to ponder; go deeply into yourself. Most of you are ready to use this material very productively, not only on the intellectual level, but also on an inner level. You can begin to institute true freedom by your willingness to change your mind, your beliefs, your attitudes, your assumptions, by your willingness to give up the obsolete that confines you and thus liberate your inner God and establish true self-responsibility. Then you no longer need the confinement of rigid rules.

Find that part within that can create an echo now to the words I have given you. Let these words nourish and strengthen you where you need it most. Make room for the ever more emerging new consciousness as it spreads on the inner plane and fully embrace the movement. Go with it! Trust that this can only enhance you and your life. You are all being blessed in truth and in love. Be your God.

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